The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (review)

Andrea Frisch's compelling study examines the dissolution of the feudal "ethical" witness and the emergence of an "epistemic" witness whose authority is based on first-hand experience. Primarily the product of culture, rather than a "philosophical abstraction" (13), the authority of the witness shifts as medieval feudal concepts of community give way to the nascent nation-state of sixteenth-century France. Through the lens of modern critical theory, Frisch reads medieval and early modern juridical rhetoric, literature, and travel narrative to show that the notion of witnessing as "a monologic discourse of first-person experiential knowledge" (12), a definition too easily assumed by modern scholarship, was far from self-evident in pre-modern France.

The first chapter presents Frisch's theoretical and historical framework and her most innovative claim: testimony in medieval folk law was dialogic in nature since the witness's credibility was based not on his experience, but on his standing within the community. The witness of folklaw is thus not a "first" but a "second person" since his authority is constructed by the community, a construction which in itself is a form of witnessing. Chapter 2 examines how this ethical model manifests itself textually. Whereas John Mandeville's popularity derived from his ethical standing as a Christian knight, Marco Polo undermined his credibility by organizing his narrative around the figure of Khan rather than the ethos of medieval, Christian Europe. Rabelais' Pantagruel plays with forms of ethical witnessing and introduces an early version of the epistemic witness, as seen in the voyage buccal; there, the narrator recounts only his experience within the giant, even as the story continues in the world without. Tensions between ethical and epistemic witnessing in pre-modern juridical rhetoric and in literature persisted as French legal systems became increasingly bureaucratic and nationalized (chapter 3). In a fascinating discussion, Frisch demonstrates how Montaigne's "Des cannibales"invokes the very idea of ethos through his ideal witness, a man without name or standing, but whose character alone guarantees the credibility of his supposedly eye-witness account. Chapters 4 and 5 reveal what Frisch has been working toward all along, Jean de Léry's account of his voyage to Brazil. In Léry, witnessing becomes entirely epistemic; testifying through writing is now an ancillary act to the experience itself. A climactic chapter 5 demonstrates both the expansive scope of Frisch's project and her critical acuity by showing how Léry's version of witnessing was informed by Calvinist theology, which itself relied on the notion of the witness, a "faithful interlocutor" who interprets experience and makes testimony meaningful.

It is proof indeed of Frisch's exemplary methodology and style that she is able to lead the reader from Mandeville to Calvin while situating her work in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions of testimony, and particularly holocaust testimony. Her analysis, notes, and bibliography disclose the juxtaposition of postmodern theory and early modern texts that constitutes one of the project's greatest strengths. Frisch's elegant epilogue returns the reader to the theoretical discussion that opened the book. The early modern witness, it turns out, is as useful "for thinking the 'post modern subject'" (187) as it is revealing about the parameters of pre-modern ethos, epistemology, and subjectivity, a claim that, by the end of the book, Frisch makes most persuasively.